The histories of Herodotus;

HERODOTUS XV
injured, champions the weaker, and restores the balance. All
this is ingrained in the Greek temper. All this is Hellenic,
as it is Herodotean. ") The historian keeps strictly to the sphere
of national thought, and proof texts might be drawn from
Solon and Theognis and Pindar, as well as from Herodotus.
We must go farther down before we come to the " Chance
central of circumstance," to Fortune, such as Thucydides con-
ceives her and as Polybius conceives her. This poetical jus-
tice simplifies the scheme of the universe—makes it perhaps
suspiciously simple. God in history becomes too much a deus
ex machina, a too convenient untier of knots; but even our
century demands an increasing purpose that runs through
the ages, and even those who have rid themselves of religious
formulae are not always superior to spiritual manifestations,
to the study of psychical research. There are those who have
gone so far as to call Herodotus a sceptic lined with a spir-
itualist.
Superior to his predecessors in his conception of his task,
superior, after all, in his critical method, Herodotus's greatest,
it is fair to say his unapproachable excellence lies in his style.
True, the style of Herodotus loses much of its charm—the
Greek scholar is tempted to say all its charm—in the transfer
to another idiom. Not the least of its attractiveness lies in the
dialect, the leisurely Ionic, with its soft vowels, its deliberate
utterance, its quavering rhythm, its old-fashioned vocabulary.
Biblical English, biblical German, which has been tried, does
not reproduce the tone of Herodotus. The employment of
consecrated phrases in a secular narrative grates. We have a
jargon, not a dialect. The chief thing gained is the simple
structure of the sentence, which is common to the Hebrew
original of the Old Testament and to the Greek of Herodotus.
But the dialect is not everything, and as a famous Greek critic
has undertaken to prove by actual experiment that the spell
of Herodotus is not broken by the translation from Ionic into
Attic, so a transfer from Greek into English does not efface
all the Herodotean charm. The dialect is gone, it is true, a
cunningly wrought robe with gleams of epic gold. The varied